BSP Light Bleed and Physics Objects

Like a few others, I’m having a problem with BSP walls and lighting.

So imagine this setup: Starting with an FPS template empty map, we have a level with a single, static directional light (default sunlight). The level consists of an ‘outdoors’ area and an ‘indoors’ area, connected with a door. The light outside seems fine, the light inside seems mostly fine, except for a slight bleed/leak at the edges of the floor. This can be fixed by increasing (decreasing for BSP) the lightmap resolution value. So far so good.

Problem is, even with a fixed bleeding on the floor, any mobile objects (imagine a few boxes, some of them static some of them movable and physical, the movable ones are affected, the static ones aren’t) remain very bright when they are anywhere close to the wall. This includes the player character, who is very much illuminated near the walls.

Increasing wall thickness is not possible (it needs to be 20 units or it’ll look silly). Replacing all BSP with static walls is currently not feasible, I’d like to prototype the level using BSP instead, because that’s much easier to edit and change around.

Error occurs regardless of lighting quality settings (from preview to production). The other threads did help me in making it clear that the lightmap resolution of the floor needed changing, but they cannot help me with the current problem of making sure that a character or physical object inside the room is as dark as a static object. Again, all static objects in the room ARE properly lit.

(EDIT: Another solution in a different question about static lighting on movable objects is to “light as if static”, but this would not help with characters being too bright, would it? It also means that the object remains dark if I move it out of the room during play.

The goal here is to have a functional prototype level where a player walks from the bright outside into a pitch black room while also being pitch black, so he can camp there and shoot the next guy who enters. Right now he stands out like a light bulb.)

EDIT2: By altering Volume Light Sample Placement in world settings to ~0.1, the object now is darker in the dark. However, one error remains even then: When I look towards the wall behind which the bright outdoors is, my view adjusts as if I looked into actual light, although that wall is not illuminated from the inside, only from the outside. Looking that way, my view adjusts as if I looked into a light, so even in a pitch black room, depending on my orientation, I sometimes can see objects and sometimes cannot, simply because of the brightness adjustment.

Is BSP just broken?

EDIT3: Nevermind, same problem with movable actors and characters being lit even in rooms made of statics. They are not fully lit, I need to stress. They are darker than in the sun, but still much much brighter than statics.

Hi Spec,

Feel free to post any images where you’re seeing problems, but as you figured out the volume lighting samples will improve lighting for your movable objects, within reason.

Here is my setup and test for this.

I used the Third Person Template as a starting point.

This is using default settings for the world settings. I reset them back to default from what is changed for the template.

In this I changed the Volume Lighting samples from 1.0 to 0.5.

Here is a video demonstration using the last version with a player character.

Also see the documentation for [Lightmass Global Illumination][1] with the section Character Lighting.

Thanks for the in-depth reply, great service! I don’t have the editor in front of me right now, but I’ll report back ASAP.

No Problem. Let me know how it goes. :slight_smile: